New tips seem endless. This episode has even more tips, most of which I have never seen, but some I use myself and will be adopted into future woodworking projects.
Watch it on Youtube: https://youtu.be/WxVJzxuzAdE
I am going start off with one of my favorite woodworking challenges ... drawing circles or arcs (truth is, I am challenged to do this) ....
The place I often use arcs is when I am making table tops. I often want to ease the corners rather than leave them sharp and depending on the table, these edges could be slightly rounded or heavily rounded, but they all need to identical rounds on each corner of the table. When you are using a compass for this task, the question is, where is the pivot point if the pivot point is off, you end up with some sort of an oval, not a circle. The best way to find the pivot point is to lay a square down and align each side at the same distance.
Next is drilling into the end grain in dowels. Most dowel manufacturers use the best quality of woodcut possible in making dowels. You will find that dowel material is always straight grain from end to end, it needs to be, especially the thinner material otherwise it is unstable. This feature means the drilling into dowels is often a little bit easier because the drill bit doesn't tend to "wander" once it enters the wood, but HOLDING the doweling material is more of a challenge, that's why it's easy to make a holding jig like show in the picture below. It's easy and works like a charm.
Drilling into to dowel material can create one issue, and that is the drill bit as it is being forced into the wood can CRACK the doweling material because all twist bits are aggressive cutters. The way to fix this is the tip from Todd, who discovered that when you drill a small diameter dowel, it's best to start very tiny and work up to a progressively larger drill bit, but ALSO spinning the drill bit in REVERSE goes a long way to cutting into the dowel less aggressively the thereby not splitting the dowel
Another example of this "reverse or backward woodworking" like I talk about in a video a couple of weeks ago is when using a counter sink bit. Almost always when you use these bits in wood you end up with a very ragged edge. The way to fix this is to REVERSE the bit in the hole, it cleans up the counter sinkhole and leaves a nice smooth edge.
Eric sent this tip to me, and that is using masking tape on your tape measure for marking measurement. I don't often have to mark things, but once in a while it comes in handy to actually mark the tape on the measure with your measurement, the best way to do this so you don't mark up your take measure is to use a bit of masking tape, what a great idea Eric.
Michael sent me this trick for making thumb screws of thumb bolts, that is bolts that can be easily used in jigs and many other items where the bolts need to be loosened and tighten often, and using your hand to do this is the quickest and easiest but doing this with just bolt head can be more difficult. By using the box end of a wrench a suitable bolt, and some hot melt glue it's quick and easy to make a thumb screw that works very well. You could even pick up colored hot melt glue and cover over the top of the head if you want to make these more permanent.
And there you have it, more great ideas come from subscribers and others from me ...
Copyright Colin Knecht
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